You hear this again and again from the Left, that George W. Bush was a cowboy, that he went into Iraq without consulting anyone and there were no WMDS in Iraq. Even conservative media repeats the erroneous claim that there were no WMDs.
So here is your primer for getting it right, whatever your political stripe.
Bush consulted everyone under the sun, went for multiple UN resolutions and got Congressional approval before he moved.
One thing that people often forget was that it was an element of the cease fire originally signed with Iraq that Iraq allow the weapons inspectors in, a fact they continually skirted.
So it wasn’t just operating on someone’s careless words or a personal “red line” (oh, say, like Obama). It was based on enforcing actual ceasefire agreements, which if Saddam were allowed to flout them, really would put us at risk, not to mention the credibility of the United States.
Further, the belief in the WMDs was across both aisles and with the UN as well. A fact that the left seems to conveniently forget.
Lastly, there most certainly were WMDs. Let’s hear from Warrant Officer Rick Elliot:
Here’s more on WMDS here. But to shortform it, WMDS and residue were being found by US soldiers for years after we went into Iraq. Moreover DNI James Clapper (yes, that guy) testified in 2007 that much of the WMDs had been moved to Syria, as Rick Elliot notes above.
Yes, a good chunk of Assad’s weapons came from Iraq, and Russia helped with the transfer. This is the movable weapons game. Just as the weapons were moved from Iraq to Syria, many of them have now been moved away from known sites in Syria, and some went to Hezbollah before weapons inspectors came into Syria most recently.
http://weaselzippers.us/2013/11/02/us-army-warrant-officer-schools-bette-midler-that-there-were-wmds-in-iraq/
